Daniel
Webster Professor of History and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Dartmouth
College

Since an epidemiologist, a medical anthropologist, and I long taught
a course on plagues at Dartmouth College, several people suggested that
I should here make the course syllabus available for those wanting to
work up their own courses on the Black Death. Unfortunately, though,
since the course covered a range of infectious diseases from bubonic
plague to AIDS, its specific medieval content was relatively slender.

As it happens, though, the late David Herlihy long taught an excellent
Black Death course as part of Harvard's so-called Core Curriculum, and
a syllabus from the early 1980s follows. Because the publisher withdrew
his required text from circulation, I have removed all mention of it
in the syllabus. No real content is lost thereby, and the course's imaginative
range of coverage remains unaffected. Inevitably, some of Herlihy's
recommended reading is now a bit dated and his lecture titles do not
always make their planned content clear, but these problems are easily
addressed through use of the following two books:

David Herlihy, ed. Samuel K. Kohn, Jr., The Black Death and the
Transformation of the West. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1997. This short book is an edited version of three lectures
Herlihy gave at the University of Maine in 1985. In a very real way
they encapsulate the themes he stressed in his course, and Kohn has
provided up-to-date references in the notes to his introduction.

Rosemary Horrox, ed. and tr., The Black Death. Manchester
Medieval Sources series. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1994. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's Press. This is by far
the most extensive collection of relevant sources in translation.
A full range of the evidence is presented, so many different approaches
become possible, whether medical, social, economic, demographic, or
what-have-you. In addition, the "Suggestions for further reading"
are excellent and contain leads on where further bibliography can
be easily found.

The Herlihy Harvard syllabus follows:

The Black Death: Ecological Crisis in Late Medieval
Europe

Course requirements: One hourly, one final, one paper.

Students should select a paper theme in consultation with the instructor
or section leader. The theme should deal with the relationship of plague
to a particular individual, group of individuals (manor, village, city),
institution (a university, religious order, guild), or attitude (views
on death and dying, melancholy, antisemitism). The paper need not deal
exclusively with the plague of 1348, but may focus upon later epidemics
in Europe, up to c. 1715, the date of the last great plague outbreak
(at Marseilles) in western Europe. A large, machine-readable data set
exists, showing age distributions of the Florentine population, city
and countryside, in 1427, for those who might want to try their hand
at historical demography. [The data set in question is now available and analyzed
in David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their
Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1985)--CTW]

Sample titles would be:

The Black Death in the Thought and Works of Petrarch

Patterns of Population Decline and Recovery, Normandy and Tuscany

The Black Death on the Estates of the Bishop of Winchester

The Black Death at Battle Abbey

The Black Death and the Jewish Community at Strasbourg

The Black Death and a Medieval University (e.g., Oxford, Cambridge,
Paris, Bologna)

The Black Death in Piers Plowman

Representations of the Danse Macabre in German (or French
or English) Art of the Late Middle Ages

The Problem of Rat Migrations in the European Past

The Physician and His Art in Geoffrey Chaucer

Diet in Geoffrey Chaucer

Plague and the Construction of York Cathedral

Students should also read Albert Camus, The Plague. One of the
questions in the Final will deal with this novel.

Required Readings:

Sources (collection of Xeroxed materials, chiefly contemporary
documents, illustrating the plague and its effects, available at Core
Office).[More than replaced by the much fuller sources found in the
Horrox book cited at the end of my comments above--CTW.]

Recommended Readings:

The Black Death. The Impact of the Fourteenth Century Plague,
ed. Daniel Williman. Binghampton, New York, 1982.

Robert Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development
in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past and Present, 70(1976),
30-75.

Anna Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning. Columbia
University Press, 1931.

Albert Camus, The Plague, tr. Stuard Gilbert. 1948.

George Deaux, The Black Death, 1347. Hamish Hamilton, 1969.

Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton,
1977.

Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349.
George Bell and Sons, 1980.